For the first two songs on the new Linkin Park CD, you won't have any idea whom you're listening to. The opening cut features a voice that sounds like either a woman or someone doing a Justin Bieber impersonation. The second song sounds like something from a Grade C science-fiction flick.

The third doesn't make things much clearer. The synth-driven dance cut suggests a song New Order might have considered, then rejected as too flaccid, in the '80s.

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Could all this be coming from one of the most popular and cynical rap-rock/nu-metal bands of the last decade?

Apparently, Linkin Park means to sink their teeth deep into the hand that feeds them with "A Thousand Suns." In case you missed the point with their fake-out opening, consider lyrics like "I'm sitting in the smoke of bridges I have burned," in track number three. Or this from cut four: "Everybody wants the next thing to be just like the first/I am not a robot/I am not a monkey."

In fact, they are incredibly rich rock stars who in the past eight years have sold more than 18 million albums in this country alone, largely by dumbing down what's left of mainstream rock.

Presumably that lucre buys all the freedom you could want for album four. But to earn that freedom, you need a skill set and character worth stretching. And nothing in Linkin Park's past, or present, suggests that's in play.

Imagine Limp Bizkit suddenly deciding to go all Pink Floyd on us. Or Nickelback making their idea of an early Brian Eno album. That's the woeful ambition-to-talent scale in evidence here. The band has described the new album as "surreal," which presumably means a lot of the songs blur together. No fewer than 15 cuts crowd the tight 47-minute length of the CD, many of them fragments or, more accurately, sonic non sequiturs.

It's no secret whom the band had in its sights as role models on these tracks. With its faux-panic synths, "Blackout" sounds like a neutered Nine Inch Nails. "Wretches and Kings" aims, woefully, for the stabbing guitars and politically charged lyrics of Rage Against the Machine. If Linkin Park has abandoned its old formulas, apparently it was only to nick those of others.

The CD's greatest risks come in quieting down the vocals and slowing the rhythms. "Waiting for the End" features Chester Bennington's softest vocal to date, while songs like "Iridescent" focus on a tortured piano riff. Unfortunately, Bennington still has the adenoidal whine of the most ineffective emo singers, while rapper Mike Shinoda continues to sound like Vanilla Ice - without the street cred.

In theory, it's nice that Linkin Park didn't want to repeat themselves this time. But when your talent lies in spewing cliche, it's best to go with what you know.